This study reveals the creep damage mechanism of soft rock containing irregular particles under fluid-stress coupling through the collaborative analysis of self-conducted triaxial seepage-creep tests and numerical simulations. For the first time, a three-dimensional irregular particle clump model is integrated with the Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM)-Discrete Element Method (DEM) coupling approach for soft rock creep simulation, where the multi-sphere clump model is employed to characterize the geometric morphology of real irregular particles with high precision. Coupled computations are implemented using the open-source codes LIGGGHTS (for DEM) and Palabos (for LBM). Validation is performed by combining benchmark cases and self-designed triaxial seepage-creep tests (under controlled confining pressure, axial pressure, and seepage pressure), systematically comparing the macroscopic creep laws observed in experiments with the mesoscopic mechanisms derived from numerical simulations, thus achieving validation from unit tests to system-level experiments. This research provides a more realistic computational framework with demonstrated capability for seepage–creep simulations of saturated soft rock, and offers a basis for extension to other seepage-driven particle-transport phenomena through additional detachment/migration modelling.
Mei et al. (Fri,) studied this question.